Seminar 9th November

Just a reminder that next Tuesday 9th November at 2:00pm I will be giving a seminar at the Arndt Corden Division of Economics on the role of energy in long-run economic growth. I'll be happy to send you a copy of my paper if you e-mail me. We hope to get it up on the web in a formal working paper series soon at which point I will blog about it. Abstract and details are here.

CCEP Working Papers Launches

Yesterday, CCEP: Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at ANU was launched. The Centre has around 30 associates. The majority are from outside ANU and several are from outside Australia too. We already have the first working papers up on the website.

EEN Symposium: 22-24 November

The EEN Symposium will take place between 22nd and 24th November at the Crawford School at ANU. The symposium will showcase the results of the research carried out by the Environmental Economics Research Hub as well as presentations of 14 invited papers from outside researchers. My presentation is at 1:30pm on Monday, 22nd November.Registration is free! You can find the full program here.

ARC Funding Outcomes Announced

The Australian Research Council announced it's decisions on applications for Discovery and Linkage grants today. Congratulations to Frank Jotzo and Peter Wood on the success of their application. Also, congratulations to my colleague in the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Prof. Athukorala whose proposal with Peter Robertson: "Sustaining India's economic transformation: challenges, prospects

Porsche Develops Hybrid Technology

I blogged about the development of hybrid cars by BMW and Mercedes when I was visiting Munich. My point was that fuel economy standards were forcing luxury car makes to adopt hybrid technology. I saw this as a route to wider adoption of hybrid technology in mass-market cars. Non-luxury hybrids seem so far to only appeal to "green consumers" willing to pay a premium for lower fuel consumption.

Tests for Non-Linear Cointegration

It took more than 25 years since the discovery of cointegration for someone to come up with general tests of cointegration in nonlinear regression models. Choi and Saikkonen published a paper on the topic in the June issue of Econometric Theory. One place where this might be relevant is, of course the environmental Kuznets curve, where Martin Wagner argued that standard cointegration methods

Survey Paper on Estimating Consumer Demand Systems

If you are looking for a nice survey paper on estimating static consumer demand systems (I was) Apostolos Serletis and William Barnett put one out a couple of years ago in the Journal of Econometrics. It's a nicely organized paper that should be understandable to anyone who's done the basic graduate level micro-economics and econometrics courses. In other words, it is really approachable compared

Why You Should Have a Blog

(if you are an academic)The vast majority of hits on my website that originate with Google are from people entering keywords closely related to my name. By contrast, Google Analytics shows that almost no-one looking for my name arrives at my blog. So the blog attracts an audience that would be unlikely to arrive at my website and check out my publications on all the topics that I write about on

Index Numbers and Consistency in Aggregation: Part II

This post gets even more technical than the last. I'm just blogging about what I'm reading in the course of my research. I read a whole bunch more papers on index numbers, which got more and more technical. The bottom line is that for most applications the chain Fisher index is an appropriate index to use. An index is superlative if it is exact for an aggregator function (e.g. a production

Index Numbers and Consistency in Aggregation: Part I

There are many formulae for the index numbers used to compute price and quantity indices, such as a consumer price index or a volume index of imports, in economics. The Laspeyres, Paasche, Divisia, and Fisher indices are the best known of these formulae. A body of theory examines the criteria that can be used to decide which formula to use in a particular application. One important property is

Launch of Centre for Climate Economics and Policy

The launch of the new Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at ANU will be on 27th October following the Asian Climate Change Policy Forum. The new centre will be directed by Frank Jotzo. There will be a working paper series, which will take over from the EERH Working Papers in the area of climate change.

Writing and Publishing Tips from Nature

Very good advice (almost all of which I follow myself) from Nature on writing and publishing. My only caveat is that there is a real trade-off in economics between getting published in reasonable time and getting published in the top journals. The top journals have very slow review processes and very high rejection rates. Not all of them use the "desk reject" system used by top natural science

Causes of the Demographic Transition

Oded Galor has made many contributions to growth theory and population economics and the connections between them. A http://ideas.repec.org/p/bro/econwp/2010-12.html">new working paper examines various economic theories of the causes behind the demographic transition. In Galor's terminology the demographic transition refers specifically to the decline in fertility rates and population growth.

Energy Efficiency Report Part II

Reading through the report they seem to come to ">similar conclusions to me on Australia's track record on energy efficiency. The main goal is a 30% reduction in Australia's energy intensity by 2020. This implies an annual reduction of 2.6% per annum. Since 1980 energy intensity has declined by 1.3% per annum so the target is fairly ambitious in seeking to double this historical rate.The

Report of the Prime Minister's Task Force on Energy Efficiency

The report of this group commissioned during Kevin Rudd's period as prime minister was released about a week ago. I gave a presentation to some members of the team earlier this year on my work comparing Australian energy efficiency to that of other countries. So I was particularly interested to see what they came up with. One interesting point for academic economists is that the extensive

John Ionnanides

For those of you interested in meta-analysis, the Atlantic has an interesting article on John Ioannidis (needs subscription I think?). I've written about him previously and his paper "Why Most Published Research Results are False". This article gives more color about him and his research group. On a related note, you can now get my article on meta-analysis of interfuel substitution for free at

Tips for Choosing a Title for a Paper

I'm having a harder time than usual in deciding on a title for our latest paper. For some reason none of the alternatives I have seem good. So I looked on the web for some ideas and the following seem to be the key useful ones:1. Make sure there are the main keywords in your title. You may think that your abstract will handle that. Google Scholar thinks otherwise.2. Shorter is better than longer,

The Story of Climate Change Legislation in the Obama Administration

Peter Wood pointed out this story in the New Yorker, which chronicles the history of the so far failed attempts by the Obama Administration and various senators to legislate on climate change policy.

Is the Drought Over?

As you can see from the above graph, after a long period of standing at about 50% capacity, Canberra's dams are now at around 80% capacity. All the dams in the Western catchment in the Brindabella-Namadgi mountains are near capacity. Googong to the east which is half the total capacity is only at 60%. But that too is an improvement. As we flew into Canberra on Thursday we could see that the

Back Home

I'm finally back from my trip to Europe (mainly work) and Asia (mainly family visit/vacation). As an Australian the only country we visited that seemed expensive overall was Denmark. Sweden no longer seems to be a terribly expensive country as it once seemed to be. The Big Mac index doesn't agree though. Thailand, our last stop, is of course way cheap but I noticed that drinks in Starbucks don't